Description

Our first “Night Dive” of the 2019 – 2020 Kata Beach dive season is off to a good start with us finally completing the Seahorse Bingo card by finding a Spiny Seahorse (Hippocampus Histrix).

We were cruising out to the rubbly area around 12 – 15m where a few adventurers had reported spotting them, usually hiding in the finger-like purple/orange tube corals that dot the sandscape. Once we located the finger coral pods, we found, Common Seahorse, Phantom Velvet fish, Frogfish and other assorted random and rare critters which were very cool, but not our coveted Spiny Seahorse.

Eventually, at around 12m we found one! Very light greys, purples, and yellows though in the photo you mainly see the top yellow and black of his head. His bottom half was not colored in yet due to his adolescence. I tried desperately to get a full-frame body shot of him, but he was moving about a lot, high-tailing it between the fingers of the orange and purple coral tubes that make up the background of this shot.

Thankfully I was able to perch in a spot on the sand that was near to an open space between the coral fingers, I literally just waited for this Spiny bugger to move into that particular area of the coral pod and drift slowly into place. Snapped a few shots and left him to roam, thankfully this one was fully in focus :)

There was also a pea-sized Frogfish in the same small group of finger corals, tiny tiny tiny, but that was an impossible shot, get you next time froggy!